The Invitation
PROJECT ENTRY 001 · 2 September, 2026
My Mother’s Garden in full bloom.
The family home, a changed future, and the invitation that set everything else in motion.
When my father, Ray, asked my husband, Jay, and me to come and live with him, the invitation carried years of family history.
There was a garden here long before Generate By Design, and long before I thought I might one day write about it. This is my family home. I grew up here, left, came back, left again, and eventually found myself living here once more at a very different point in my life.
After I survived meningococcal septicaemia in my twenties, my parents renovated and zoned the house so I could have a wing of my own. At the time, there was enormous uncertainty about what recovery would look like and whether I would be able to work again, so they reshaped the house around a future none of us could predict. I lived there for several years before eventually moving to Alice Springs.
The garden was a big part of Mum’s life. She was a passionate gardener, spending years layering Australian natives with more traditional planting, including English roses and bulbs. Great callistemons and banksias towered through the garden, alive with rosellas and parrots. At the same time, a wall of Acacia ‘Limelight’ along the front boundary had grown into an extraordinary green curtain between the house and the street. It was a mature, generous garden, full of the life that comes when plants have occupied a place for many years.
Mum’s health eventually meant that she could no longer remain at home. Leaving a place that meant so much to her and moving into care was a profound and painful change. This was her home, and losing the ability to live here was part of the grief of that period for all of us.
The idea of Jay and me making a home on the property had begun before Mum went into care. It had been her wish that we build a dwelling at the back of the property, replacing an old, dilapidated shed, and we had already engaged architects to explore what that might look like. It was a future she knew about and wanted for us.
After Mum died in 2022, Dad remained in the family home and invited Jay and me to come and live here with him. The arrangement was different from the one we had originally imagined. We would share the main house, while Dad would have another space of his own elsewhere on the property.
There was something deeply familiar about returning, yet something completely new about it too. I was coming back to the house my parents had once reshaped around my needs—this time with Jay, and with Dad inviting us to imagine the next chapter of family life here together. That chapter began in grief. What changed was the shape of the future we had imagined, and the fact that we were now making it without Mum.
In 2023, Dad engaged Humpy Co to create a new studio at the back of the property. Some of the great callistemons stood where that building would go, and as we began looking more closely at the garden, we also learnt that the wall of acacias along the front was moving through senescence. Some of the planting that had defined the property for years would have to make way for what came next.
Those decisions were considered carefully, with a deep understanding of what Mum’s garden had already given the house, our family, and the wildlife it had fed and sheltered for years.
Once the studio was built, the property presented a new question. The family home carried decades of history at one end, while this new building sat at the other. Between them was the garden, and suddenly, the relationship between all three mattered enormously.
The studio has since taken on another life as a counselling space for Ray Daniels Counselling and Third Chair Counselling, including the work Dad is developing to support dementia carers and their families.
By then, I had a strong sense of how I wanted us to live across the property. I wanted the garden to draw the old and new parts together—to feel lush and generous, to remain deeply Australian in its planting, and to create more opportunities for us to be outside. The front garden, in particular, needed to become a contained place where we could safely spend time with the dogs, rather than a landscape of beautiful, mature shrubs that left very little room for that kind of shared life.
At the end of 2023, Biodiverse Garden Design sent through their design. It arrived around Christmas, and I remember looking at it and feeling that somehow they had listened to everything I had been trying to express, translating it into something far more beautiful than I could have imagined.
The main house and the ‘Humpy’ were joined through the landscape. Spaces that had felt separate suddenly belonged to one another. Planting, paths, walls, and changes in level drew the property together while keeping it abundant, lush, and alive. It felt almost magical, and impossible to say no to.
In 2024, Outer Haven Landscapes began turning that drawing into the garden itself. I was there throughout the build, watching lines on a plan become walls, paths, planting, and places to move through. Questions would arise and be answered, materials would appear, plants would arrive, and day by day the property would change around us.
Then, the garden began to settle into itself. Plants reached towards one another, flowers appeared, birds found their way through, and the hard edges softened. The garden became fuller, richer, and increasingly its own.
As I watched that happen, I began adding my own: vegetables, herbs, flowers, and seedlings. I became interested in what could be propagated, what could be eaten, what could be placed in a vase, and how productive growing could enhance the garden's beauty.
Most of that productive layer is taking shape in raised beds, pots, and other deliberately composed growing spaces. I want the garden planted into the earth to remain overwhelmingly Australian native. In contrast, vegetables, herbs, fruit, edible flowers, and many of the plants I grow for cutting sit within it as another layer. Their containers and structures contribute form, height, repetition, and abundance while allowing the native landscape to remain the foundation.
That idea has become central to Generate By Design. Productive growing can be beautiful enough to belong to the composition of the surrounding garden, with food and flowers treated as part of its architecture and artistry.
Generate By Design emerged from that close attention, but its story begins much earlier. It begins with Mum’s garden growing around the family home, with a house my parents once changed to make room for the life I could live after serious illness, with a future we had imagined together taking a different form, and with Dad opening that home to Jay and me again.
That is the invitation the garden grew from.
